 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
You are receiving this email because you're a customer or have updated your company data on Kellysearch. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Marketing News Now: |
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
 |
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Vertical Search & Tapping the B2B Tech-Buyer Source: Search Engine Journal Authored by: Julie Mason, Kellysearch.com For full article, click here. The B2B audience: we know their needs are not being entirely met by general search engines and they are the buyers with the largest budgets. But do we truly understand their needs and tendencies? With the results of a recent survey by Enquiro, “Marketing to a B2B Technical Buyer” we are now closer to tapping the B2B buyers’ potential than ever before. First, we need to understand what a technical buyer is and what influences them during the purchasing process. What’s a Technical Buyer, and how do we define a purchasing cycle? A Technical Buyer is charged with matching the needs of the organization or product to a solution that will satisfy those needs, while ensuring the solution is compliant with the technical (IT, etc.) aspects of the company. What’s unique about a technical buyer is that he or she receives feedback and suggestions from the personnel that will use the technology daily — think where the rubber meets the road — and from the strategic decision-makers of the organization, who make the ultimate financial decisions. The relationship the technical buyer has with the product user and with the company’s strategic decision-makers places them in two critical points in the purchasing cycle. Of the four stages, the technical buyer exists mainly in the research stage and also plays a significant role in the negotiation stage (56.3 and 16.3 percent, respectively, of tech buyers exist in those two cycles, according to the Enquiro research), meaning that while they may not find the problem or allocate funds for the actual purchase, they are involved in the entire journey in between. In other words, they are the long link between need and conversion. How do we get the TB’s attention, keep it and get them to tell their boss to buy the product? Technical buyers search content. It’s all about content and how to find it – which makes sense. Technical buyers exist mostly in the research phase, so they need the content in order to present the best and most compliant options to the ultimate decision-makers. In the aforementioned survey, content preferred comprises white papers, product literature, case studies and articles in industry journals. But you must get their attention first. In fact, the respondents rated, on a scale of 1 to 7, online influencers including search engines and vendor websites higher than offline influencers such as trade shows and even word of mouth. Among those online influencers that build awareness, search tops the list of most influential, scoring an average 5.4 out of 7 on the “how influential” scale given to respondents. Vendor-generated content – such as blogs, Webinars and articles about industry observations and trends – holds B2B buyers’ attention throughout the research phase, as the field of possible vendors reduces to the “finalists” that proceed to the negotiation phase. Essentially, optimizing your site for vertical and general search engines will have the most impact in the awareness stage, having information about your product will keep the research flowing on your website, and links to third-party content about your products will propel you to the negotiation stage. What does vertical search have to do with it? The inaccuracies of general search engines for directed business queries are well-documented, but new research shows that the vertical searches are filling that gap. Our famed technical buyer is 2 percent more likely to use a B2B vertical search engine than the rest of his B2B population and 8 percent less likely to use a general search engine than his B2B counterparts. Now that you have the background on the technical buyers and what influences them during the purchasing process – namely rich content, relevant vertical results and information that speaks to the user and the company decision-maker – tapping that BtoB potential might come a little easier. Back To Top Tracking Practical KPIs with Web Analytics Source: Search Engine Journal Authored by: Jim Newsome, Kellysearch.com For full article, click here. In this article, we will dig into some Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) in depth, focusing on the metrics that my colleague, Julie Mason of Kellysearch.com, wrote about in her recent article ‘A Practical Guide to Key Performance Indicators’: Visitors per conversion Average page views per visit Cost per lead Stickiness Percentage of new visitors These are all great starting points for website analysis, but sometimes they raise more questions: Visitors per Conversion All websites should have a goal, even if it’s just a PDF download, and so tracking your conversion rate in this way is an excellent measure of your site’s success. But what if you know your conversion rate is low, but you can’t identify the reason? The answer lies in the customer’s journey through the conversion process and by configuring your analytics tools’ funnel analysis you can quickly identify problems. The checkout process on an ecommerce website is probably the most common example of a customer journey, typically catalogue -> product -> shopping cart -> shipping -> billing. In your own conversion process you may see 1,000 people visiting the catalogue page, but only one coming out the other end having made a purchase. This is probably because of a design or usability flaw that is creating a bottleneck at one of these steps. Funnel analysis can identify where that problem is by showing where users enter and leave the process at each step. Funnels can be tricky to configure and analyze, but they are one of the most effective analytics tools for determining user interaction and generating genuinely actionable findings. Average Page Views per Visit & ‘Stickiness’ These KPIs are typically for websites with content & advertising-based revenue models. The key here is to measure how well your visitors are engaging with your website. You may not always want these numbers to be high – sometimes you want a user to get in and out of your site as quickly as possible, for example, when assessing the quality of an internal search function. There are also some new technologies out there that can disrupt these particular metrics. For example, Ajax is an increasingly popular scripting language that enables websites to, among other things, load new content on a page without refreshing that page. One page view of an Ajax page can actually mean the user has viewed multiple pages. Consider this when looking at your analytics data and you can use alternative measures of ‘stickiness’ such as time spent on the page. Cost per Lead Establishing the Return on Investment (ROI) of your website can be critical to establishing its success and if you are going to measure ROI then you need to understand what your traffic is costing you, i.e. what is the cost of your online marketing. Marketing is traditionally a difficult medium in which to measure ROI, but with the right analytics this can be much easier. For example, Google Analytics has the facility to import AdWords cost data into your analytics reports automatically. Add a monetary value to your conversion goals and you can have an automated calculation of ROI and Return on Advertising Spending (ROAS) for each visit. Percentage of New Visitors This is another great metric for measuring the success of your marketing, but there are two key points to remember in order to get the most from this KPI. First, make sure you are using your analytics solution’s tagging system to measure where these visitors are coming from and assess which elements of your marketing campaigns are successful. Secondly, there some technical issues with this particular metric that every analytics user should be aware of. In particular, this KPI is (in most modern analytics systems) dependant on the use of cookies. Ideally these should be first party cookies (i.e. set by the website the visitor is on) rather than third party (set by a different site to the one currently being viewed) since first party cookies have a lower deletion rate and are blocked less frequently. But even these get deleted and every time a user who has ever visited your website deletes their cookies, they are labeled as a new visitor the next time they visit. The solution is to use first party cookies wherever possible and, as with all analytics data, study the trends rather than the absolute numbers. With the multitude of possible metrics that analytics systems make available, it can be difficult to select the right ones for you and even more difficult to interpret the results. However, once the basics are in place you can start digging deeper – and the results can profoundly change the way your business works online. One final tip: If you’re starting out in analytics you could do a lot worse than take the advice of analytics guru Avinash Kaushik, spend 10% of your budget on the software, and 90% on your analyst . Back To Top PPC Beyond ‘GYM’ Source: Adotas For full article, click here. Pay-Per-Click ‘beyond the majors’ (Google, Yahoo! and MSN) has been a common theme on this year’s conference circuit. But are these other PPC networks really worth trying? With rising bid prices on GYM and increasingly innovative offerings by some of the alternative PPC networks, the answer, it would appear, is a resounding ‘Yes.’ One of the key ways that PPC networks are differentiating themselves is by offering less broad reach ad distribution and focusing instead on the development of more niche, sector specific distribution channels. Welcome to the world of vertical Pay-Per-Click. The premise of vertical PPC is quite simple: ad distribution channels that are optimized across specific verticals will generally deliver lower volume but higher quality traffic. Take, for example, the travel sector. A tour operator that specializes in trips to Europe may, through a traditional broad reach PPC network, see their ad displayed on a general news site beside an article about Europe. With a travel specific vertical PPC network, that same ad could be seen on a travel review site that focuses specifically on Europe. Both ads are ‘contextually’ relevant however the ad on the travel site is likely to reach a consumer at a more advanced stage in the buying process. When considering vertical PPC, advertisers should be mindful of a few important points. Firstly, how results are likely to stack up against the time and effort required to set up and manage campaigns. Choosing a network that offers enough reach in a specific vertical is important, as is choosing a network that can provide help and advice with optimization once campaigns are live. Advertisers should remember that not all vertical PPC networks are created equal and that some will be stronger in certain verticals than others. One company that has had its eye on the vertical PPC market for some time is MIVA Media, the PPC division of MIVA, Inc. MIVA Precision works alongside MIVA Core (the company’s existing, broad reach PPC Network) and is designed to give advertisers increased options when considering PPC campaigns beyond GYM. ‘Verticalization’ is nothing new in the offline world. It is true for cable and print magazines. It is also true that more of a vertical focus has been developing in the PPC world. Just look at media spend according to industry sectors. In the UK, between January and June in 2006, four vertical categories – recruitment, finance, technology and automotive – accounted for 63.2% of total PPC Ad Spend. With such an accountable and measurable medium, the proof of these vertical PPC networks in the results they deliver. So how is MIVA Precision performing for clients? Ryan D. Turner of TheUseFul said, “On the MIVA Precision Network, our click through figures were over those received from our Google campaign. Overall, we received impressive results with upwards of 200% return on investment.” Lindsay Rinehart of Avenue A|Razorfish said of the vertical network, “The MIVA Precision Network has produced cost efficient leads and targeted traffic at low costs. CPCs are 11% cheaper and conversion rates have been a steady 22% higher than our overall campaign average. These metrics have made MIVA an important partner for our client.” The PPC market has grown exponentially over recent years. The rise in vertical PPC could well be the catalyst that drives this growth over months and years to come. Back To Top |
|
This notification was sent to #emailaddress#. Add us to your safe list / white list This message is intended only for the use of the person(s) (\"Intended Recipient\") to whom it is addressed. It may contain information, which is privileged and confidential. Accordingly any dissemination, distribution, copying or other use of this message or any of its content by any person other than the Intended Recipient may constitute a breach of civil or criminal law and is strictly prohibited. If you are not the Intended Recipient, please contact the sender as soon as possible.Reed Business Information Ltd. +44 (0)20 8652 3500 |
